


Lonesome Day

by inlovewithnight



Category: Homicide: Life on the Street
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-11-16
Updated: 2009-11-16
Packaged: 2017-10-03 03:31:58
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,398
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13720
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/inlovewithnight/pseuds/inlovewithnight





	Lonesome Day

_Once I thought I knew  
Everything I needed to know about you_ ("Lonesome Day," Bruce Springsteen)

 

The thing about Tim is, he's deceptive. I'm not saying he's a liar; it's not a matter of intent. It's just his nature. Tim's like a pot of water on the stove. Everything's quiet, you look away, and when you turn back again it's boiled over and the whole thing's changed to steam. A watched pot never boils, a watched Tim never changes. You look away for ten seconds-- you _blink_\-- and it all goes to hell.

You think you know a person.

But it turns out you don't know anything, you never did, and as soon as you realize it, it's so _obvious._ My whole life, my job, is about asking the right questions. Ask the right questions at the right moment and you can break someone. Split them open clean, right down the middle.

I never asked Tim the right questions. I didn't think he needed breaking. No idea there were secrets inside.

And that ought to piss me off, that there was this mystery right under my nose, riding around next to me in the car, and I never even noticed. It never triggered any of my instincts to question, to investigate, to _detect_. Tim kept a whole piece of his life covered up with his damn rambling stories and stupid jokes and the loose-limbed way he walks down the hall.

Deceptive. You get used to that pot not boiling and not boiling and you look away for a _minute_...  
***  
The thing about Frank is, it's all surface. Frank can't keep a secret. Frank can't lie. He considers this a pretty solid proof of moral superiority. I don't know, maybe it is. But it also means that it doesn't occur to him that anybody else is hiding anything, unless he's looking for it. On the job, he's always looking, he assumes the witnesses and the suspects are lying about everything. Everyone else, though, he assumes is as straightforward as he is, up there on the same moral high ground. He stops looking at the surface without ever taking ulterior motives into account, and people don't work that way. Normal people don't. It's why Mary left him, why he can't get along with the bosses or half of the other people in the precinct, why I can't stand to be around him right now.

I screwed up, and I know it. I let this job get to me, let those dead and hurting children get to me, and I said too much. Now Frank knows that I've got things under the surface. He's looking for them, with his detective eyes. I've been knocked off the morally-superior ground and I'm down with the criminals, waiting for him to walk me into the Box and take me apart. Piece by piece by piece, laid out for him to line up with the facts and build himself a confession. I don't know what I'm guilty of, exactly, even though I've been carrying the weight of it around my neck my whole life, but he'll figure it out if I let him. He'll peel away the layers and lay my guts out clean.

That night on the pier, I said that part of what hurt most was that my father never looked at me, never _saw_ me. Now I'm not sure, because Frank sees me now and it actually feels worse. It's making me wonder, if my father had seen me, if I hadn't been able to hide for all these years, would I have even made it this far?   
***  
I reached out to him and he shoved me back. That ought to piss me off, too. I ought to be pissed at _him_, after all these years of nagging me to open up, to let him in, to have him over for dinner, now pushing me away like he did. But I'm not. I'm pissed at _myself_, which is not a state I'm accustomed to, nor an experience that I'm enjoying.

I believe in speaking my mind. Honesty, directness, no bullshit, no screwing around. Other people also profess to believe in this, but other people are liars. The world runs on endlessly interlocking layers of deception, and when you interfere with that, people get angry.

At least, they're supposed to get angry. They're not supposed to shut down and walk away. My whole system of assumptions for dealing with the people in my life has taken some hits lately. I haven't changed-- I've tried so damn hard not to change. But they're not responding like they used to. They're taking the baby and going back to New York. They're doing cases with Meldrick and hiding behind a newspaper in the break room.  
***  
Frank thought I was asking him for something, when I told him about it. Comfort or absolution or...something. Maybe simple friendship. Something else that Frank does not give, anyway. And I wasn't asking, not really, I was just tired and thinking about that dead little girl. All of the dead little girls and little boys that I've seen on this job, and the people who told them how good they were and to shh and then made sure they were quiet forever.

And I can see it, now, like the fact that Frank is really looking at me has knocked the scales from my own eyes. (I probably picked up that phrase from him, the way I picked up an ulcer and my technique in the Box and needing coffee before I'm even alive in the morning.) I can see that all of the times I asked him why he didn't want a partner, I was really asking my father on the other side of him why he hadn't wanted to protect me. Frank had no obligation to answer that question. Nobody does.

He wasn't obligated to offer whatever he was trying to give on the pier, either. He did that against his own nature, and that was when I realized just how pathetic this whole thing--my life-- had become. So I had to walk away from it until I can figure out how to deal with it. How to fix it. Crack the case.

I mean, I can't walk away from all of it. The bodies keep coming across my desk in manila folders, and I've got to brush my teeth in the morning and check the sports scores at night and pull my shifts at the Waterfront so Munch and Meldrick don't kick my ass. But I've got to walk away from Frank, until I either figure out how to hide again or get used to being seen.  
***  
I'm not supposed to drink whiskey anymore, not with my medication. I haven't had _cheap_ whiskey in years, anyway-- why should I poison myself with the bad stuff when I can afford to poison myself with the good? But when I'm lying there in the middle of the night in my empty house, trying to figure out who's gone wrong here, the rest of the world or me, it feels like I've been drinking cheap whiskey. Like I can taste something sour and toxic on my tongue.

I'm a detective. I use logic to find the answers, order and reason. And intuition, yes, but only after I look at the facts. Right now facts and logic and intuition are all lining up to tell me things I don't want to hear and don't want to deal with. I hate being wrong.

It's not going to fix itself and it's not going to go away, not any of it. I'm going to have to take a step. The first step, the one all of the doctors told me was going to hurt like hell. And they were right.

But I have to do something, because sleepwalking through one day at a time in this empty house and working solo in the squad room is going to drive me insane sooner rather than later. Everyone assumes I'm happier alone-- Frank Pembleton's a lone wolf, after all, isn't he? Hasn't he always been?

I've fooled all of them, and apparently Mary and Tim fooled me, but it looks like I just can't fool myself. Something's going to have to change, and it'll start tomorrow, if I can just make it through today.


End file.
